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Ask HN: What are some books where the reader learns by building one project?

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Re: Ask HN: What are some books where the reader learns by building one project?

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you provide links to Shirley's books, please? I'm interested in learning about CG.

Here's the books he has written: https://www.cs.utah.edu/~shirley/books/index.html

I think these are the short books herbstein was referring to: http://in1weekend.blogspot.com/

Re: Ask HN: What are some books where the reader learns by building one project?

#183
post #21

Modern Compiler Implementation in ML by Andrew Appel

I second this. Build a compiler from scratch. Main annoyance is that it uses SML - most readers are likely to want to use OCaml, and it's a bit fiddly translating between the two.

Why not just work with SML and focus on the compiler building part? Any particular reason to want to use OCaml?

Re: Ask HN: What are some books where the reader learns by building one project?

#185

The Build Your Own Metal Working Shop from Scrap series by David J. Gingery.

The series is certainly worth reading for the learning, but actually doing it? Don't bother. The books were written when hobby-level machine tools were very expensive. In these days of cheap Asian imports, it's not worth building your own from DIY castings unless you're doing it for fun. I will say that the first book (metal casting) is very useful, because you can learn to make aluminum castings easily and then mach…

Yeah, it's a ton of work. I never got past the metal casting.

Re: Ask HN: What are some books where the reader learns by building one project?

#186
post #173

Orchestrating Docker. I don't know if it's one of the best, but it teaches Docker concepts with a single project, and as you progress through chapters, you will find different ways you can deploy applications using Docker containers. https://www.packtpub.com/virtualization-and-cloud/orchestrat...

Is it possible to read the first chapter for free so that I can decide if I want to buy the book or not. There almost no reviews of your book.

Yes. You can download a sample chapter from the aforementioned link

Re: Ask HN: What are some books where the reader learns by building one project?

#187

Orchestrating Docker. I don't know if it's one of the best, but it teaches Docker concepts with a single project, and as you progress through chapters, you will find different ways you can deploy applications using Docker containers. https://www.packtpub.com/virtualization-and-cloud/orchestrat...

I know India's a big place but it's a bit of a coincidence that you and the author are from the same city ;)

Oh! I'm sorry. I forgot to add the disclaimer, and can't edit the parent comment anymore. I'm the author.

Re: Ask HN: What are some books where the reader learns by building one project?

#189

"Physically Based Rendering" walks you through the theory behind, and the implementation of, a photo-realistic rendering system (not real-time). An extremely thorough guide to ray tracing. https://www.amazon.com/Physically-Based-Rendering-Third-Impl...

I don't like that this book is posted. Sure, it shows you an actual renderer. But it doesn't show you how to incrementally build said renderer. That is probably what a lot of people are looking for. Peter Shirley has written three short books about raytracing that I would recommend as an alternative.

I've read Realistic Ray Tracing by Shirley, before reading the first edition of PBRT. RRT definitely has a more "incremental" approach, and is a lot more approachable than PBRT.

Re: Ask HN: What are some books where the reader learns by building one project?

#190

I remember liking http://www.tangowithdjango.com/ . It goes over building a link aggregating service using Django. However, I also remember it being free. Doesn't seem to be an option with the most recent release.

I enjoyed Tango with Django, and was very positively surprised when they emailed me an update for the PDF I bought. The first was inexpensive, and worth it, hopefully helping support the authors.

Not only a good tutorial for Django, but the authors made it even better offering the free improved/corrected version.

The final project is a Django webapp that allows visitors to add sites and rank them. Many different aspects in Django are looked at, as well as beyond, such as CSS, Bootstrap, search, Jquery, AJAX, etc.

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